Perchance to Dream, or I Married Richard Alpert
by Haiza Tyri
Summary: An examination of the kind of woman Richard Alpert might marry after escaping the Island. He looks for a companion, editor of memoirs, interpreter, and nurse. He finds an adventure. Richard/OC
1. Outrageous fortune

**Author's note: This story is a direct sequel to I Was Wrong: From the Memoirs of Richard Alpert, but as that story seems to be going nowhere at the moment, I decided to post this as a stand-alone story.  
Chapter titles are from Hamlet's "To be or not to be" speech.**_  
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_Outrageous fortune_

I married a man I could not understand.

That was a large part of the attraction, to be sure. I've always been drawn to mystery and the unknown. The person you can know immediately with a glance has no attraction for me. But when I met Richardus, I knew instantly that I could never come to the end of his mystery.

We met through a matchmaking service. I only signed up for it because I was interested in the adventure of it. I didn't have the money to travel or the skills to join the CIA, so I've always looked for my adventure in people. I found it in the very first man the matchmaker paired me with.

It was just dinner, the first meeting. Terribly clichéd, but dinner gives you many possibilities for examining the other person.

Richardus laid his cards out on the table straightaway, in a manner that did not bode well for the mystery aspect, until I saw that the cards hid more than they revealed.

He said he was not looking for a romantic partner. His wife had died long ago, and he still had not gotten over her. What he really wanted was a combination of tour guide, language expert, administrative assistant, and, ultimately, nurse. Tour guide because he was largely a stranger to present-day America, language expert because it had been so long since he had spoken Spanish to anyone that he had almost forgotten his own native language, administrative assistant because he intended to write his memoirs for a friend (who was dead, and, incidentally, he didn't care if said administrative assistant read his memoirs, because she wouldn't believe a word they said), and nurse because he was far older than he looked and thought he was going to run out of life within a few years.

Also he had nightmares.

In exchange for this business-proposition of a marriage, he was prepared to leave his second wife millions of dollars.

He spent the rest of the meal interrogating me about myself. Maybe he needed more time to decide, but I was decided then and there. The money was an inducement, because with just a fraction of millions of dollars I could travel for the rest of my life. But I would have accepted him without it, because, well, mystery. The man set himself up as an enticingly mysterious figure from the beginning. First of all, the wife who died long ago. She must have been really someone for him never to have got over her after ten or fifteen or twenty years. Second of all, how could a man with a perfect American accent who used American money unhesitatingly and knew precisely what to order in a restaurant be unfamiliar with the culture? In the third place, re-teaching a native speaker Spanish? Which Spanish, anyway? My mother is Costa Rican, my father Spanish, from Andalucía, and I speak both dialects fluently. In the fourth place, memoirs? How does a man who barely looks forty have enough history to write memoirs? And just the straightforward, simple statement that I wouldn't believe a word of it was enough to challenge me to want to believe it. And, fifthly, the statement that he was old and intended to die soon—what, was he fifty instead of forty? Maybe he had some kind of secret disease. True, he had a touch of white salting his black hair, but for the main, he looked merely like a remarkably attractive man of about forty or forty-five, with a slim, strong-boned, dark face and the most deep, piercing, haunted dark eyes I had ever seen. I could well believe this man had nightmares. I could believe he had probably done things that haunted him. Maybe he had memoir-worthy memories after all. Whatever the case, this was a man who would be an adventure to know, and I wanted to know him. I didn't intend to lose sight of him.

At the end of the meal, while we were drinking coffee (with a stiff dollop of rum in his), I laid my cards on the table as he had his. "Richardus"—(and what kind of a Spanish name was Richardus, anyway?)—"maybe you need more time, but I don't. If you'll have me, I'll have you."

His eyebrows went up. "You make important decisions quickly. Why?"

"You're the strangest person I ever met, that's why. You've discovered, with all your questions, that I've had one of the most uneventful lives imaginable. I think you've had the opposite, and I want the opposite."

He laughed, a slightly bitter sound. "I wish I'd had your life."

"Well, you can. I mean, I'll share. I'm not particularly looking for romance myself, though I won't reject it if it comes. I just want something _interesting."_

"Believe me, I'm interesting."

"I do believe you."

He stared at me for a moment as if he were seeing me for the first time all evening. Maybe he was. He'd told me he'd already tried this three times before and come up with nothing. "You remind me of someone."

"Not your wife, I hope."

"Oh, no. A woman named Ilana. You talk like her. You even look a little like her, though she was Russian or Israeli, not Spanish. We both worked for the same person, for a while. She died for it, while I only tried."

"Tried to die?"

"It's harder than you'd think, dying."

"But you think you're dying now."

"I am, the same way you are, only faster. My age is catching up with me."

"How old are you?"

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you."

"Try me."

He shook his head with a wry smile. "Maybe someday I'll tell you, and maybe you'll actually believe me. But not yet."

"Does that mean you've accepted my proposal?"

"Was that a proposal?" he asked with some amusement.

"I think so. So, have you?"

"I think so," he said in surprise. "You're the only person I've met off the—in America who seems prepared to take me at my word."

"What did the other three women do?"

"One called me crazy and left. One obviously only cared about the money, and I left. One attempted romantic overtures, and I left again. Not one of them said, 'Oh, fascinating. Let's give it a try.'"

"You make me sound like I'm on Star Trek."

"Star Trek?"

I stared at him. "You don't know Star Trek?"

"You'll find I don't know much. I'm very uneducated."

I had to laugh at that, but he seemed serious.

"That's part of the tour guide aspect. I have a certain amount of knowledge about certain aspects of society, but I have an abysmal ignorance about the rest of it. I'm interested in being educated. You are well educated."

"So, professor as well as tour guide. Sounds like the dream job. Why do you want a wife rather than an employee?"

"Because I want someone with me," he said softly. "I thought I would be better off alone. I've tried for several years to live alone and found I needed a companion. Closer than an employee, but not romantic. In the past I have primarily had mentoring relationships, and that's all I'm used to. I've been married, and I've been a mentor and had a mentor. It's all I know. I told you. I don't know very much."

I studied him for a moment. He really meant it. Along with the depth and mystery in his eyes there was a certain simplicity. Mystery upon mystery.

"I'm willing to go along with your weird ideas on one condition."

His dark eyebrows rose. "What?"

"Do you really have millions of dollars?"

Wariness came into his eyes. "Yes."

"Can we go to Spain? Or are you really stuck on the U.S.?"

Richardus laughed. "I'm not completely stuck on the U.S. It would be…interesting to go to Spain. As a tourist." Amusement and wonder lit his eyes.

Reader, I married him.


	2. Who would fardels bear

_Who would fardels bear_

I thought he was writing a fable. He had a remarkable brain, after all, equal parts uneducated simplicity (he hadn't been lying about the things he didn't know) and farseeing depth. He laughed at street performers like a child and stared at cathedrals like a country bumpkin, but he spoke of experiences and people like an ancient sage. I thought it was possible he could take the experiences of forty or fifty years and turn them into a fable of love, loss, murder, slavery, starvation, rescue, prophethood, loss of faith. His character Ricardo, caught between competing forces of good and evil, never quite sure which was which—the human condition distilled into epic fable. The only part that didn't seem like a fable was the character of Ben, who seemed devastatingly real, yet still epically real, like the sum of every abused-child-turned-serial-killer on Criminal Minds. Especially when I learned Ben was the dead friend he was writing it for. Friend? Son, maybe. Foster son, maybe, whose bad choices Richardus blamed himself for. An epic fable as a way of working through father-son issues he could never work through in person.

Whatever the form of the story, I never doubted Richardus had experienced all the emotions of his Ricardo character. Loss of his dearly-loved first wife, whether in the Canary Islands in 1867 or like a normal person in a hospital bed in some Latin American country. Murder of a cold hearted doctor? Maybe. Imprisonment? Possibly. Slavery and shipwreck? Many a man has felt enslaved and the complete shipwreck of his soul. That Richardus had been shipwrecked I did not doubt. You don't get eyes like his without total devastation at some point in your past.

And then purpose. Great and glorious purpose. On the far side of devastation the only thing that can pull a person out is purpose, whether it's service to a man who controls the forces of good on a distant, hidden island or finding a hidden talent like figure skating or a profession like nursing. We humans need purpose, and Richardus gave Ricardo the truly glorious purpose of communing with good and communicating it to the people in his life.

Only to take it away again. The loss of Ricardo's faith was as devastating to him as the loss of his wife. Perhaps more. After his wife's death, he fought hard to live against forces conspiring to kill him. But after his loss of faith, he sought death against the forces conspiring to make him live. I wondered why Richardus made Ricardo unable to die. Unless it was self-inflicted punishment, for wanting to live when his wife died and for wanting to die when his faith died. After all, what had Ricardo put his faith in but a man? First a man and then a boy, and the boy had killed the man. (I wondered what sort of sad and twisted thing had happened between Richardus, Ben, and whatever "Jacob" stood for.) And men—humans—always fail at some point. There's no point in putting your whole soul into following someone so fallible, even if he does seem supernaturally powerful.

I'm really only reiterating what Richardus wrote at the end of his memoirs. He taught me that, not I him. He restored my own faith to me in telling me the tale of his loss of faith. I'd run away from my parents' faith when I was younger because of things that happened with their priest. I identified only too well with Ricardo's fear of the priest in the beginning of Richardus' tale. But the more I read, the more I listened, the more I wrote his notes, the more I remembered what I thought I'd forgotten. I'd fled from God when a man failed. But if we shouldn't treat men like God, should we treat God like men?

Richardus was astonished and slightly amused when I started to go to Mass again. Nor did he believe me when I told him his priest had been wrong about forgiveness. But then, I didn't believe him when he said his story was a straightforward memoir. When I asked him what certain elements of his tale meant, like the name of the ship, _The Black Rock,_ or the Island or the plane crash, he only shook his head at me with melancholic amusement and said, "I told you you would not believe me."


	3. Devoutly to be wished

_Devoutly to be wished_

Richardus and I were companions for three years and lived as husband and wife for four. Did you expect anything less? His initial premise was laughable. Two people who choose to spend their lives together aren't going to be able to remain detached but are going to either love each other or hate each other. Confessedly, I knew from the beginning that I was attracted to the man as much as to his mystery. I tend to be a rather whole-hearted person, and I knew that if I was going to spend my life with this man, I was going to give my whole heart to him. I didn't tell him that, though, because he had no intention of giving his to me. As he said, he wanted an assistant and companion in a wife, not a lover. Not that one can't be both… But the tale of his wife's death still hung so heavy on him. However long it had been since she died, he was right in saying he had not gotten over her, and I think he never intended to. He still wore a fine silver cross he said had been hers.

Meanwhile we traveled. Spain first. You'd think that I, who had never been out of the United States in my life, would be unfit to be a tour guide for Europe, but I was the one who interpreted the world to my husband. It was as if he had existed his whole life in a bubble and didn't know what to do with this wider world. His story would have me believe he had spent a hundred and forty-two years on an Island, rarely leaving. Whatever had happened, the world was a stranger place to him than to me. His dark-rimmed eyes took everything in with the wonder of a child, and I learned to delight in finding that look on his face, because too often his face was that of a man looking back on a long, heavy life. Ricardo regretted how so much of his life had gone. Did Richardus regret so much of his?

His hair became white more quickly than I would have imagined possible, and one day I noticed fine lines radiating out from the corners of his dark eyes that I had not seen before. I thought they only made his face more distinguished than ever. But he saw me looking and went to look in a mirror. He stared at himself for a long time.

"I was the same for so long it is strange to see change. So at last I rejoin the human race. I was so desperate not to die. So afraid of it. And then eventually living became habit. I didn't think about it. I went on, day by day, not thinking about time passing, about life or death. I forgot about birthdays. Then one day I suddenly realized how old I was and how fruitless my life seemed, and I tried hard to die, only to realize on one and the same day that I _could_ die and that I wanted to live. Really _live._ Not just go on day by day. Do we only appreciate life when we face death?"

"A few lines isn't death," I said.

"I'm sorry, but it is for me. I only have a few more years left."

I didn't believe him. I didn't want to believe him. Had I waited thirty-five years to find him, only to lose him after so few years? He looked at me with new sorrow in his eyes.

"I'm sorry. I told you at the beginning."

"You certainly did that." And he told me he wasn't going to love me, either.

"Do you want to go to England?" he asked after a moment. "For something different?"

After Spain we'd been to Portugal, Italy, Greece, Croatia, Hungary, and Poland, taking our time, stopping and staying where it struck our fancy, spending whole months in one place so he could concentrate on writing. We'd stayed on the Grand Canal in Venice, in a cold stone hut in the Portuguese mountains, on a boat off the Macedonian coast. The idea of going to England, with its genteel green fields and neat stone fences, amused me, so I agreed.

We went on a walking tour, and sometime along the way, Richardus held my hand. And sometime along the way, after three years of being married and not being husband and wife, the walking tour turned into a honeymoon. When I asked Richardus why, he said, "It's because you love me, and I am going to die. Because I am old and ready to stop withholding myself. Because I don't need my last few years to be as lonely as my last century and a half. Because you have given to me, and I wish to give to you."

By all of which I think he meant he loved me. Not with the passion and devotion young Ricardo had given Isabella, but with the maturity of experience and the recognition that it is not a betrayal of a dead spouse to love a living one.


	4. So long life

_So long life_

It was then I started to believe him, as he got older and older while I hardly changed at all. In four years he went from looking in his mid-fifties to looking in his seventies, aging in fast-forward. He said it was on account of Jacob dying and being away from the Island. He said he was still afraid to die and meet God, because he still believed that priest, who only cared to get money out of him.

We traveled for six years and only stopped in the seventh because he needed rest and wanted time to finish the last bit of his memoirs. He'd been putting off writing about Ben. He'd written notes, dictated a few things to me, enough for me to get an idea of what sort of person Ben was and what sorts of things he'd done. But at last he was ready to write his own role in Ben becoming who he was, ten years after fleeing the Island and abandoning Ben to his own fate.

I didn't know I believed him until the day after he finished his memoirs and retired to his bed. He was much older than seventy now. He had two full-time nurses and an on-call doctor and spent much of the time lying in his bed hooked up to various machines in the large, luxurious bedroom of our beautiful house outside Portland, Oregon. He'd always had a thing for Portland, he said, though he'd never actually been there before we bought the house. He liked to lie looking out through the large windows at the foliage so unlike what he was used to.

That day there was a visitor. There had been only one other visitor, to my surprise, a man named Frank who had a strange but nice face and only stayed for a little while. Richardus asked him if he ever saw "any of the others," and he only shook his head.

"The only reason I was there was to get the rest of you out. It didn't want me for anything else." Then he said in a low voice he thought I couldn't hear, "She looks like Ilana."

"I know."

"Is that why you married her?"

"No."

"And why'd she marry you, old man?"

There was a smile in Richardus' voice. "Mystery."

Frank clearly thought he was saying, "It's a mystery." But he wasn't.

This man who came wasn't like Frank. He was small, shorter than I, and had hair that stuck straight up and a quiet, watchful, intelligent face with large, blue-grey eyes. When I opened the door, he said, "I'm here to see Richard," in a voice that didn't ask permission.

"You mean Richardus?"

He stared at me. "He's going by Richardus again?"

I shrugged. "I didn't know he'd stopped."

He stood on the doorstep and just stared at me for a moment.

"I know, I know. I look like Ilana."

His eyebrows went up. "Are you his nurse?"

"His wife."

"He married again? Hugo didn't tell me that."

"Apparently Hugo likes to keep some things to himself," I snapped, which made him smile.

"Not very many."

"Who is Hugo, and more importantly, who are you?"

"I'm an old friend of Richard's. A _very_ old friend."

I put my hand up to my mouth. "You're Ben. Are you? Are you Ben?"

"Yes," he said quietly.

"From—from the Island. With Jacob and Locke and Juliet and Sun."

His eyebrows were surprised, his eyes evaluative. "Just with Hugo now. There's no one else there Richard would know now. Well, and Walt. May I see him?"

"Walt?"

"No, unless you're keeping him locked up in your basement. Just Richard today."

"Of course. But—he thinks you're dead, you know."

"I thought he might."

I let him into the bedroom and closed the door behind him. When he came out only a short time later, he was carrying the stack of Richardus' memoirs. I was sitting in a chair outside the door staring blankly. He set the journals down and put his hand on my shoulder.

"I didn't expect you. I'm glad you're here." He gave me a smile, gentle and open, not the kind of smile I would have expected from Ricardo's Ben.

"It's all _real."_

"Yes, it is. I think you'd better go in there. I can see myself out."

I went in. Richardus was crying. I'd never seen him cry before. "He forgave me," he said in Spanish. We always spoke Andalucían Spanish.

"I told you," I said. I climbed onto the bed and lay down with my face on his chest. He stroked my hair. "Richardus, how old are you?"

"I was one hundred and eighty-five this year. I am so thankful God gave you to me for these last years. I'm only sorry they were so short."

I sobbed.

"Will you do something for me?"

"Yes. Anything."

"Take my body back to the Island. There's a place I want to be buried. Hugo will know where."

I sobbed again, felt his hand brushing away my tears. He kissed my forehead. I raised myself up and kissed him.

"I could live with you for all hundred and eighty-five of those years and still never come to the end of who you are."

"It's not really parting. I know that now." He smiled. "I think I could sleep now."

He was asleep even as he said it. I settled back down with my face on his chest and went to sleep to the rhythm of his heartbeat. The rhythm had stopped when I woke.


	5. No traveler returns

_No traveler returns_

The next day I received a letter from one Hugo Reyes. It said,

"Dear Mrs. Alpert,  
"Ben says he thinks Richard would like to be buried on the Island. I think I know the spot he would have liked. Would you like to bring him here?  
"You're welcome to stay as long as you like."

It was signed with a nearly illegible "Hurley."

Underneath was, "Please come," signed in a neat scrawl, "Ben Linus."

I have been there ever since.

**The End**


End file.
